Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, today announced the shipment of its 12 billionth PIC® microcontroller (MCU) to the Nidec Corporation—a preeminent global supplier of precision motors, based in Japan. Microchip delivered this 12 billionth MCU approximately 10 months after delivering its 11 billionth.
Today’s announcement demonstrates the industry’s continued acceptance of Microchip’s 8, 16 and 32-bit PIC microcontrollers as the high-performance, low-power, cost-effective solution for embedded-control designs.

“The time between each of our 1 billionth shipments continues to accelerate, in the face of Microchip’s increasing MCU market share, and shipping our 12 billionth to a long-term customer like Nidec makes this achievement particularly gratifying,” said Microchip’s president and CEO Steve Sanghi. “Motor control has always been one of our strengths, and the fact that such an esteemed global leader in motor manufacturing has continued using our PIC MCUs for so long is a testament to that strength.”

“We have reached this milestone because of the high quality of our PIC microcontroller portfolio and MPLAB® development systems, along with the outstanding support provided by our direct-sales team and sales-channel partners,” Sanghi continued.

A customer for more than 10 years, Nidec makes extensive use of Microchip’s 8-bit and 16-bit PIC MCUs and dsPIC® digital signal controllers with advanced motor-control peripherals. Additionally, Nidec uses Microchip’s comprehensive platform of scalable motor-control development tools and free motor-control software, application notes and tuning guides to achieve rapid prototyping and shorten development cycles.

“Our longstanding relationship with Microchip Technology has been beneficial to both parties, and we have always valued the outstanding quality of their motor-control devices,” said Hitoshi Tatsuno, Nidec’s vice president of operation management department and purchasing department. “We are honored to be the recipient of Microchip’s 12 billionth PIC microcontroller.”

Microchip serves more than 70,000 customers in over 65 countries, has shipped more than 1.4 million development tools to date, and partners with more than 130 global third-party tool manufacturers. Additionally, Microchip has a broad portfolio of more than 1,000 8-, 16- and 32-bit PIC microcontrollers, and is the only company to support all of its microcontrollers and digital signal controllers under a single integrated development environment—the free MPLAB X IDE, which is open source and enables cross-platform development using the Linux, Mac OS® and Windows® operating systems.